With the stock market up substantially from September’s three year low, Wall Street pundits and analysts and the popular media are once again beating the drum for “the bottom”. It seems this bear market has seen more bottoms than a box of Pampers. Unfortunately for the handful of naive investors who haven’t yet realized that the so-called experts don’t know bottoms from holes in the ground, every one of these “market bottoms” has proven to be false.
“But this is THE bottom,” the experts tell us. “And this time, we really mean it.”
But let’s bear in mind that the experts are the same folks who last year told us that the U.S. economy would grow by better than 3% this year. And then told us that growth might slow, but that we’d surely avert a recession. And then told us that we should expect a soft landing. Then following the events of 11 September, they slithered out the back door with a perfect excuse for their failed forecasts (”no one could predict such an event”) and officially proclaimed that a recession was inevitable.